Fandemonium Report — Friday

Friday morning began with cheerful Patches calling “mama” from his crib. Howard and I discussed breakfast options with related expenses and I opted to go for free breakfast at my sister’s house. So Patches and I drove 30 minutes to my sister’s house and arrived before any of my other kids even woke up. Gleek was very very glad to see me. She’d missed me during the night.

Just after breakfast Howard called me. The legible copy of the schedule had gotten sucked into the black hole of con ops and was nowhere to be found. I pulled the scrawled copy from my purse and read it off to Howard. It lacked information and had to be re-tooled, but it was a starting place for them. I left the problem to Howard and others while I relaxed for a bit at my sisters. Patches crashed into a nap early because he’d been up so late. As soon as I put him down to sleep I headed back to the con.

I arrived back at the con around 11 am. I cruised through the dealer and console gaming room to see what there was for seeing and then sat down with Howard at his table. I was just starting to want something to do when Chani came up to the table and I asked if there was anything I could help with. She told me yes, the schedule wasn’t finished yet. (At this point the con had been officially open for 3 hours.) Apparently what we’d thought were two separate rooms were in fact the same room. This meant that we had to shuffle everything around again. Chani and I sat down with a computer and made rampant executive decisions without proper authority. In the end we printed out a schedule which had every single thing item we’d been told about on it. We printed 10 copies and carried them out to post in public places.

Within one minute of bringing the schedule out, a man in a long green cape cornered me to inform me that we had the name on the Live Steel show wrong we had to fix it. And where were the three panels he was promised? I had no clue. I’d done the best with what I was given and had no desire to snatch back the schedules and re-do them yet again, so I dodged both the questions and the person and went to go sit with Howard. I felt like I’d done some good for Fandemonium and Chani went to a well deserved lunch.

Approximately 10 minutes later two con staffers came up to me in a panic. The man in the green cape was a dealer who was specifically invited to attend, he’d come all the way from Moscow Idaho and he’d been very verbally angry and insistant that he be given panel slots. These staffers have come to me to find out what to do. In hindsight this amuses me that I became in control of the schedule. At the time I was just stressed along with everyone else. Consul kindly offered to give up one of his panel slots, but was obviously and understandably upset over the prospect. I decided that we needed to stop the old schedule from being printed and we needed to find out exactly what this dealer wanted included in the new schedule. I sent the over-stressed staffers to stop the presses and went to talk to the angry dealer myself.

Confronting angry (but not violent) men is one of the situations where being female is a distinct advantage. The primate in the male brain doesn’t feel as hostile to a female. I was very polite. I appologised for the errors. I promised we were doing everything possible to correct them. I acquired a corrected name for the Live Steel show and the names of the three panels. I was NOT sure that three panels would fit so I even got them to tell me which one would hurt least if it didn’t make the schedule. I appologized again and then ran to Con-Ops where I met Kreely and the two of us undertook to find space for the three panels. We found three spaces without cancelling Consul’s panel which was wonderful because Consul had been nothing but nice and the dealers had been really really nasty.

Kreely and I declared the schedule finished and it was copied and distributed before anyone else could complain. That was the end of my involvement. There may have been other events, but they passed in my blissful absense.

I then attended Howard’s first panel before jumping in the car to drive to my sisters for dinner. (I never did get lunch). I ate, collected 4 children and accompanying baggage, and then drove back to the con where we set up camp in the hotel room. The kids love the hotel. They were under the impression that this was a really nice hotel because it had seven whole floors. They ping ponged around the hotel room until I ushered them downstairs to see the console gaming room and the Live Steel show. They loved both, but when I ask them now what they liked best, they all agree it was the swordfighting at the Live Steel show.

The kids were too wound up to sleep right away, so I splurged on a movie rental and had the kids watch Ella Enchanted. They enjoyed it, but it was something of a tactical error because it prevented Howard from crashing into bed as early as he would have liked.